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![Jonathan M Davis's Gravatar profile Gravatar of Jonathan M Davis](//www.gravatar.com/avatar/c2372c89dbe85590c9c1dd06c6f998e0?d=identicon&s=32) | Posted by Jonathan M Davis in reply to ryuukk_ | Permalink Reply |
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Jonathan M Davis ![Jonathan M Davis's Gravatar profile Gravatar of Jonathan M Davis](//www.gravatar.com/avatar/c2372c89dbe85590c9c1dd06c6f998e0?d=identicon&s=80)
Posted in reply to ryuukk_
| On Thursday, September 7, 2023 12:31:10 PM MDT ryuukk_ via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > Ideas for new features for D have been deferred for the time being
>
> This is the saddest thing ever, i've been waiting for tagged union / tuple since forever
Well, waiting for any particular feature could always mean waiting forever, since some stuff is never going to make it into D regardless, though of course, it's hard to know ahead of time which features will eventually make it in and which won't.
> IVY = bureaucracy + religion, recipe for disaster, and we are already seeing the effects: the language is now in a deep freeze state
Not really. All that really seems to have come out of IVY is that Walter and and company have re-examined the role of the D foundation, what their personal goals are with regards to D, and what the goal of the foundation should be. No bureucracy was actually added as part of any of it. At most, some time was arguably lost with the time that they spent in IVY meetings to go over their goals and where they want to go with D, but if what came out of those meetings helped focus them (as it sounds like happened), it could be that the overall result will be less time wasted over time. Either way, there was no bureaucracy added to how the D foundation or the D development process actually functions.
Basically, Walter and company re-examined where they wanted D to go and what they could best do to achieve that, and they were getting a lot of feedback that too much existing code was being broken, and not enough bugs were getting fixed. So, they're temporarily focusing on fixing stuff over adding new stuff, and they're working on coming up with a cleaner way to add new features to the language over time without breaking existing code. That does mean that we're not getting new features for the moment, but it doesn't mean that things will stay that way, and depending on how well they do with better enabling adding new features without breaking code, we might actually see more new features in the future than we would have otherwise.
They're still trying to figure out the details, but it sounds like they're going to attempt to make it so that major changes to the language will be versioned off in some fashion (what they're calling additions) while letting older code compile with the same semantics that it had before. So, newer code will use a newer version of the language while still being able to work with older code that hasn't been updated. How well they're going to pull that off is an open question, but if they do a good job with it, it should make it easier to make larger changes, because they won't be breaking older code at the same time, whereas right now, they have to be very worried about breaking existing code with every change that they make. So, the fact that they're re-examining their approach to making breaking changes to the language could actually result in us getting new features faster over time even if it means that there has temporarily been a freeze on new features in the meantime.
- Jonathan M Davis
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